Mail Servers

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Saturday 20 September 2003 04:38 pm, dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 20, 2003 at 03:40:54PM -0400, Tom Lopolito wrote:
> > I've been asked to help pick a mail server for a small company with
> > 15-25 users. They want to bring control in-house. I have about 3 months
> > to get up to speed on whichever is chosen but I'm having difficulty
> > deciding which one to suggest. I've looked at Courier and Postfix so
> > far. I've heard that Sendmail and Cyrus are great but probably way more
> > than I need and more difficult to setup. Can I get some suggestions
> > from those out there that have setup a mail server and their
> > experiences?
>
> The realistic, well-supported choices other than sendmail are:
>
> qmail (www.qmail.org, cr.yp.to, www.lifewithqmail.org)
> Pros: easy to configure, very secure, fairly powerful
> Cons: the author is highly opinionated

Note that in this case, "the author" is pronounced "the person who wrote the 
program and considers himself the one true programmer and all other ways 
than his are evil".  Severe religious war.  In fact, on another list both 
Dan and I are on, we just had one last week on this topic.

> postfix (www.postfix.org
> Pros: easy to configure, reasonably secure, extensible, widely used
> Cons: more likely than qmail to have a security problem (but quickly
> patched)

I've decided next time I rebuild my server (which may be next weekend- Red 
Hat 7.3 is looking a little long in the tooth, and the patch level for Red 
Hat 9 has died down a little. But I'll post a separate thread about that) 
to switch to postfix instead of sendmail.

My main motivation for staying with sendmail to date was to keep up on the 
most popular tool so if I need to admin an email server for a job, it will 
most likely be the one I know.

Since it's looking more and more like my next job will require more detailed 
knowledge of deep frying and counting pickles than administering an email 
server, it's time to go with something I don't have to patch quite so 
often.

> exim (www.exim.org)
> Pros: reasonably secure, many many options
> Cons: creeping featurism

I've heard it's very hard to install, but that's not first-hand knowledge, 
and could be FUD.

> Courier's IMAP is a good choice to use with qmail. I've never seen
> anyone use the full Courier mailserver.

I'm using Washington University's IMAP server right now, and am a little 
sick of it getting confused when more than one client log on at the same 
time (shouldn't that work???  Why should kmail get server access errors 
because I bring up my webmail??).  wu-imap uses mbox files (a file for each 
folder with all messages in that one file), and I want to switch to the 
other format (forgot what it's called)(a directory for each folder with all 
messages in their own file).  

I assume any will work file with any MTA.  Which will meet my needs needs?  
Are there any big differentiators?

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DDDD   David Kramer                   http://thekramers.net
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